As you can probably tell from reading this blog, I’m pretty proud of how fast I paid off all of my student loans. It took me just 2.5 years to pay off all $87,000 worth of it. As a brief recap, I started my first job in the fall of 2013, started paying down my debt for real at the beginning of 2014, and paid off the last of my student loans in 2016. By the time I reached a $0 student loan balance, I hadn’t even been in the workforce for three years! In hindsight, that’s actually pretty astounding. There probably aren’t a ton of lawyers out there that are debt free three years out of law school.
With my recent marriage, however, it looks like I’m officially going right back into debt again in the form of my wife’s student loans. She graduated from dental school in 2014. Since then, she’s done a one-year hospital residency and is now currently in the middle of a three-year specialty residency. Needless to say, four years of dental school, four more years of post-dental school training, and no significant income since 2010 means that she’s sitting on a pretty high student loan balance. It’s a little bit over six figures at this point.